Installation (continued):
Once you have installed both of your hard drives into the mounting bracket, you can attach the cables and reinsert it into the enclosure. The cables can be a little difficult to slide into place if you have large fingers, however it is not too difficult to get them into place. After securing the bracket to the enclosure, place the cover back on, and prepare to use the device. After powering on the enclosure there are a few LED indicators to watch on the front panel. The first is for Power, the middle one indicates RAID status, and the one on the right is the "Access" (drive activity) indicator.
Testing:
To test the capabilities of the
Eagle Tech Computers D-Series External Storage System, model ET-CSDU2F-BK, I connected it to a test system with the following components.
» AMD X2 6000 AM2 processor
» Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe @210x15
» 4GB (4x1024) Patriot PC2-6400 Low Latency DDR2 RAM
» eVGA 8800GTS 640MB
» xClio 1000W Power Supply
» 2x 80GB Hitachi Deskstar SATA-II hard drive
» 1x 120GB Seagate 7200.9 SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» 1x 400GB Western Digital 7200 SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» Memorex DVD/CDRW
» Cooler Master CoolDrive IV
» Fans: 4x120mm LED
When I first installed drives into the enclosure, I had an issue which prevented it from functioning. I installed two identical 400GB Seagate SATA hard drives, and the enclosure would not work in either RAID 0 or JBOD mode. However, each drive would work if it was the only drive installed. One of the two hard drives was partitioned from being in another system, and with no mention of this being a problem in the manual, I initially thought there was something wrong with the enclosure. After removing the partition and performing a quick format on the one drive, the enclosure worked perfectly.
Testing consisted of running HD Tach 3.0.4.0 and HD Tune 2.53 in order to gauge the performance of the installed drives. Both the RAID 0 and JBOD configurations were tested, and these values were compared to those achieved with one of the 400GB Seagate drives connected directly to a SATA header on the test computer.
